Things just got much more interesting. Hackers even got the passwords from the psn accounts.

Sony storing passwords in clear text?

i sure would think that people would wise up and realize that sony does things half assed and not to trust them anymore, move on to the 360 where your info is safe and online is secure, or maybe they will be blinded by fanboyism and stick with sony...

basically this here. as famousringo said, PSN content will i see take a huge hit.  Once psn gets back online, do you see these 75 million people jumping to buy new stuff on psn and having this info all back to sony?  i for one would be hesitent about it.  So these psn games, dlc and so forth are going to be taking a big hit imo. 

of course hardware will take a hit.  will the hit be 1 console or thousands, who knows.  if a company exec posts a stupid tweet, that alone can hurt a products sales whether its 1 or many.  so obviously this will hurt ps3 sales.  who knows how big or small.  I mean its easy enough to imagine someone in a store and seeing a ps3 and going "hmm thats the thing that had all their info stolen isn't it"  and bam 1 less customer.  but like i said i have no idea if this will be an uncountable number or a sizable hit of 10's of thousands.  but its guaranteed that at least 1 less person will buy a ps3, its stupid to think otherwise.  I mean with this in the primetime news now, whats the more likely scenerio?  someoen going, hey did you hear about the ps3?  yea lets go buy one.  or maybe we shouldnt get one.

I guess now we know why they went so hard on Geohot, they knew what would happen if PSN got hack since they didn't include security for it at all

If Sony were really building their entire online network on the assumption that the PS3 was unhackable... my God. It's so bone-headedly arrogant that I have a hard time believing it could be true. We've shipped 50 million locked doors, and if somebody manages to pick just one, they get to loot every house.

I'm concerned that this blunder could set back all digital distribution. It's certainly a sobering example of e-commerce gone wrong.

Well this looks like it is going to cost Sony some serious coin. So one way this may effect hardware sales is Sony losing the leverage to cut the PS3 price.

Eh, doubt it.

I mean, nobody is buying online content right now.

People who don't want to use their credit card though will mostly probably just buy PSN cards...

maybe the small demographic who owns both AND pays for live will start buying more 360 stuff.

I mean, it might effect sales but i doubt anyone will notice.

Sales gonna be affected but not really serious like Toyota last year. X360 might gain some mometum.

Yes, because the reputation of the company is in the gutter right now. Will it be a big dip who knows, will it last a long time, again who knows but it will impact sales by how much that I will leave to father time to inform us.

It should help Wii, PC and especially Xbox 360.  Maybe even 3DS.